Holiday Gift Guide

100 Notable Books of 2011

Published: November 21, 2011

THE LONDON TRAIN. By Tessa Hadley. (Harper Perennial, paper, $14.99.) Hadley’s artfully constructed, socially realistic novel is split between two characters who react in opposite ways to their old affair.

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Previous Years’ Lists

LONG, LAST, HAPPY: New and Selected Stories. By Barry Hannah. (Grove, $27.50.) Hannah, who died last year, had a refined eye for the outrageous; this collection shows he retained full command of his powers to the end of his life.

LOST MEMORY OF SKIN. By Russell Banks. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $25.99.) This novel, about a paroled sex offender, bravely tries to find humanity in people whom society often despises.

THE MARRIAGE PLOT. By Jeffrey Eugenides. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28.) Eugenides adeptly renders the patter of college intellectuals and the sweet banter of courtship, and is particularly astute on the uncertainties awaiting after graduation.

A MOMENT IN THE SUN. By John Sayles. (McSweeney’s, $29.) Sayles’s reimagining of America at the turn of the last century nods to both Harriet Beecher Stowe and Thomas Pynchon.

MR. FOX. By Helen Oyeyemi. (Riverhead, $25.95.) This playful tale is presented in the alternating voices of a slasher novelist, his wife and his muse, the last of whom urges the writer to embrace intimacy over violence and death.

MY NEW AMERICAN LIFE. By Francine Prose. (HarperCollins, $25.99.) Prose’s sardonic novel of a young Albanian immigrant in New Jersey sets Ameri­ca in high relief, mordant and comic, light and dark.

1Q84. By Haruki Murakami. Translated by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel. (Knopf, $30.50.) This voluminous novel, set in 1984, is simultaneously a mystery, a love story and a dystopian fantasy that raises questions of psychology and ethics.

OPEN CITY. By Teju Cole. (Random House, $25.) The peripatetic hero of Cole’s indelible novel reflects on his adopted New York, the Africa of his youth, today’s America and a Europe wary of its future.

THE PALE KING: An Unfinished Novel. By David Foster Wallace. (Little, Brown, $27.99.) Unfolding on an epic scale, this coherent, if uncompleted, portrayal of our age is a grand parable of “late capitalism,” set in the innards of the Internal Revenue Service.

PARALLEL STORIES. By Peter Nadas. Translated by Imre Goldstein. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $40.) This nearly 1,200-page novel opens in 1989 and is centered, roughly, on a Budapest apartment building whose residents have been trapped in the torpor of Communist tyranny.

SAY HER NAME. By Francisco Goldman. (Grove, $24.) Goldman’s passionate, moving narrative takes as its subject his tragically short marriage to the writer Aura Estrada, who died in a bodysurfing accident in 2007, when she was 30.

SCENES FROM VILLAGE LIFE. By Amos Oz. Translated by Nicholas de Lange. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $22.) In these powerful linked stories of longing and disappointment, Oz returns to a spare, almost allegorical style.

THE SENSE OF AN ENDING. By Julian Barnes. (Knopf, $25.) In this Booker Prize winner, an unexpected bequest forces a man to re-evaluate his relationships, present and past.

SHARDS. By Ismet Prcic (Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic, paper, $14.99.) The Bosnian hero of Prcic’s absorbing and unsettling first novel is shattered by war.

SPACE, IN CHAINS. By Laura Kasischke. (Copper Canyon, paper, $16.) What may be the most ambitious, and disturbing, of Kasischke’s eight books of poems strives to comprehend first and last things.

STONE ARABIA. By Dana Spiotta. (Scribner, $24.) A faded heroine struggles with the loss of her brother, an unrecognized rock star, in this acerbic and deeply sad narrative.

THE STRANGER’S CHILD. By Alan Hollinghurst. (Knopf, $27.95.) Hollinghurst’s sharply drawn novel tells the story of relatives and scholars grappling with the legacy of a Rupert Brooke-like poet killed during World War I.

THE SUBMISSION. By Amy Waldman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) This resonant and darkly comic novel, by a former New York Times journalist, imagines an uproar over a proposed Sept. 11 memorial.